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Congratulations, you have figured out what a P.O. Box is. A bit out of fashion (at least in NL) but was the standard for exactly this. Or people who were expect
by mvdwoord 8y ago
Congratulations, you have figured out what a P.O. Box is. A bit out of fashion (at least in NL) but was the standard for exactly this. Or people who were expecting to move around quite a bit.
My Dad used to have one (around the divorce of my mom), My Uncle had one, as he was abroad a lot and moved house a couple of times, and wanted a dutch address. etc etc.
As for paper email, aren't there also services that open and scan your mail for you?
Not exactly "DNS for physical mail" as you described but quite handy!
As for the obfuscation part, if the delivery people know how to resolve... so will many others. ;)
- lisper 8y agoNo. A PO box is a physical location, it just happens not to be my home. If I move non-locally I have to change PO boxes.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- lscotte 8y agoThere are mail services that do this - it's like a PO box, but not provided by the postal service and they will forward your mail to anywhere. These services are quite popular with RV folks and world sailors. Some will even scan your mail for you.
- imglorp 8y agoThat's still not name indirection, this is more like a 302, because your physical mail goes first to the company and then gets moved around.
- mbreese 8y agoBut the person who sent the mail doesn't know where it ends up. These services are exactly like what the parent was talking about -- someone sends a letter to a virtual address at the mail aggregator service, and the service then sends the letter on to your physical address. A 302 is like a letter that's been marked return to sender with a forwarding address. The original sender would then know the actual physical address.
- imglorp 8y agoTrue, 302 was the wrong analogy. But the good point here is that there are three kinds of indirection, not two.
- lisper 8y agoThe problem with forwarding is that the mail has to make two physical hops so it takes twice as long and requires twice the resources. This gets particularly annoying if I set the service up in, say, California and then move to New York.
- moosey 8y agoAre you sure it works this way? This seems like a very solvable problem.
- e1g 8y agoOver the holidays I researched all major providers of virtual addresses and can confirm that this is how it works. First your mail is routed to the provider’s local address or central warehouse, then they manually forward it to you. Some providers (incl the popular Earth Class Mail) operate as a hub-and-spoke network: all mail goes to their centralised distribution center, they process it and send it to you. This means if I buy something from a few blocks away, it will first have to Midwest then back to me.
- moosey 8y agoYuck.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoWould you be willing to share your research? It just so happens I’m looking for such a service currently. Email in profile.
- lisper 8y agoHow else could it possibly work given current constraints?
- toomuchtodo 8y ago> Over the holidays I researched all major providers of virtual addresses I’m okay with latency and eventual consistency. I just need an analog->digital funnel for paper mail when I’m thousands of miles from home.
- clort 8y agoIn the UK a PO Box is also an address, which you can use in different ways Mail addressed to the PO Box -> You collect from post office Mail addressed to the PO Box -> They deliver to street address (which only they know) Mail addressed to street address -> You collect from post office The most annoying thing I found was that they would only let you have a PO Box in a town if you had a street address there, which I did not.
- bertjk 8y agoThat is interesting, in the scenario that they deliver to your secret street address, are retailers able to give shipping time estimates? Or is that less of a thing in the UK due to distances being shorter?
- clort 8y agoOne the one hand I guess it wouldn't make any difference, since the PO Box must be in the same town as the street address. On the other hand, the PO Box is provided by Royal Mail. Another delivery company (there are many who handle parcels, RM only deliver letters and small packages) would not necessarily have access to it, and certainly not the associated address.
- blattimwind 8y agoPO boxes are not necessarily a physical location.
- lisper 8y agoThat's news to me. Where can I get a PO box that is not bound to a physical location?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rezeroed 8y agoThere are mail forwarding services. They have a bunch of PO boxes, give you an address consisting of the PO box address and a made-up prefix eg Flat one million. They have a web interface which you use to view received mail, trash the mail, forward the mail to a specified address, select forwarding option eg 1st class mail, 2nd class. When you move, add your new forwarding address.
- ehnto 8y agoWhere I live you can have a "Virtual Address" with the national postal service, which is essentially what you're talking about. You can direct it to various houses or you can direct it to 24/7 access postal locker at any place you like. You can change your virtual address itself or keep the same one for however long you like, and just change the final destination that it resolves to. The postal service knows where your current postal destination is set and third party freight carriers able to look it up from an API (someone has to deliver it eventually after all). Your destination can be changed in your online account, and if you want a particular package delivered somewhere different you can quickly create a new virtual address and use that instead.
- floofy222 8y agoWhere do you live? And why isn't this the norm everywhere ?
- alttab 8y agoI think the main benefit to this isn't obfuscation, nearly as it is management. Instead of storing fully resolved addresses, "pointers" to the addresses exist, which are much easier to manage.